Blog Archive

Sunday, 13 January 2008

BLOGS

If your life was so dull and uninteresting that you had nothing better to do of an evening than sit down and write about the entirely uneventful day that you’ve just had, then you’d probably think twice about putting said banal, naval gazing views online for the entire world to see or, as is more usually the case, ignore. This hasn’t, however, stopped the seemingly unstoppable rise of the blogging phenomenon, which has turned the internet into little more than a collection of self obsessed musings on what the blogger had for dinner and why X doesn’t fancy them, which is clearly not what the internet is supposed to be about: I.e. the world’s biggest and most varied porn repository.

Blogs can, along with their inability to provide anything interesting to the person writing it, let alone anyone reading it, be recognised by the writers’ idiosyncratic approach to spelling and a refusal to grasp the fundamentals of punctuation. Full stops, commas and semi colons appear irregularly, if at all, which is in sharp contrast to the exclamation mark, which turns up everywhere, whether required or not, and such is their enthusiasm for the symbol that it will generally appear in groups of about three or four at a time. The apostrophe can be considered as a lost cause as most bloggers appear to labour under the delusion that the point of it is to indicate that a word ends in an s.

It’s not just the world of teenage angst that has been revolutionised by blogging, however, as many blogs are set up by individuals keen to showcase their expertise and knowledge in certain specialised areas, or by those keen to correct a perceived bias in the mainstream media. For example, many Conservative supporters have launched a number of blogs in a bid to get their side of the story across in defiance of the left wing bias they see in the newspapers and television. The fact that there’s an equal number of blogs set up by Labour party members who want to react against the right wing bias they see in the newspapers and television in no way undermines this argument. These blogs are, however, a godsend for the newspapers, no matter which particular bias they may or may not be displaying, as lazy journalists can happily mine them for ill-informed opinions for which to fill up their papers, rather than coming up with ill-informed opinions of their own.

Most blogs exist for an average of a week before the writer realises that it actually takes a lot more effort than they might have thought to churn out this sort of nonsense. This realisation normally dawns at roughly the point the weather starts to improve. Or they get a boy/girlfriend. This has lead to blogspot being used for little more than a graveyard of abandoned sites, the sort of thing that would be a treasure trove for historians in the future. Or at least it would be if any of them actually had anything interesting to say.

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now. Keep it up! And according to this article, I totally agree with your opinion, but only this time! :)